Perhaps someone smarter and better than I should handle this latest moral outrage of the Secular Anti-Humanists. It deserves opposition greater than that which I could provide alone. However, if nobody protested maybe the very stones would cry out.

The United Kingdom once had a great and venerable institution of higher learning known throughout the entire world as The Oxford University. The school still exists; the greatness can no longer be attested to without vigorous moral dispute. They have financed research for an article entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. The abstract of this despicable work of Anti-Humanism follows below.

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

It seems a team of “ethicists” from Oxford University have at long last figured out that the differences between a fetus and a newborn center primarily in where the child is located. This would be good news, except for one niggling detail. Rather than deciding that this fundamental lack of divergence should cause the medical profession to understand that abortion was an act of premeditated homicide and proscribe the practice accordingly; they rule in the opposite direction. Here’s how the syllogisms get laid out.

1. Newborns sure seem an awful lot like fetuses. For example, I’ve never heard one quote Chaucer or Dickens.
2. Most of the Western World has legalized abortions and described it as accepted medical practice.
3. Anyone who takes a three-week old by the feet and smacks its head against a tree thirty times isn’t committing infanticide. It should be classified as an accepted medical practice. How else do you make the little brats Go The F*** to Sleep?

We here in America just shouldn’t fight it. Who knew that when our brilliant, clean and articulate, Harvard-educated President voted twice against The Born Alive Infant Protection Act of 2004 as an Illinois State Senator, he was merely presaging where Western Philosophy would arrive when it reached an apex of evolution? We should just invoke cynical realism and accept that not aborting these children would burden their mothers. Besides, if you ban abortion anywhere, ever, you have to explain “why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” (HT: President Barack Obama). And it would sure suck to violate the principles of people that have no faith at all.

So recently Cardinal George of The Archdiocese of Chicago realized something was wrong with the new DHHS policy that mandates that Health Insurance Plans will hand out birth control and some abortificants free of charge. I hope that Mr. Van Winkle enjoyed a restful nap. He wrote parishioners in President Barack Obama’s old neighborhood a letter containing the following paragraph.

What will happen if the HHS regulations are not rescinded? A Catholic institution, so far as I can see right now, will have one of four choices: 1) secularize itself, breaking its connection to the church, her moral and social teachings and the oversight of its ministry by the local bishop. This is a form of theft. It means the church will not be permitted to have an institutional voice in public life. 2) Pay exorbitant annual fines to avoid paying for insurance policies that cover abortifacient drugs, artificial contraception and sterilization. This is not economically sustainable. 3) Sell the institution to a non-Catholic group or to a local government. 4) Close down.

Cardinal George mentioned the possibility of just shutting the Catholic Church’s institutions down in two years if this typical and predictable ObamaCare demand goes into effect. My cynical realism is offended. Cut the stupid melodrama, Cardinal. Churches exist to dress a guy up in the clown suit and pass around the collection tray on Sunday. If they actually counseled or taught a decent, enlightened, or even remotely ethical mode of human existence they might even offend those people out there who have no faith at all. It would sure stink to tee off the typical ethicist at Oxford University.

All told a shutdown of every Catholic healthcare institution in America would set us back $100Bn in healthcare costs alone. The cynical realist in me thinks this is totally unfair to impose such a cost over some dippy point of religious dogma. But then again, if these hospitals are now in the business of performing “post-birth abortions,” are they really in the business of improving people’s health anymore? At some point along the way, these institutions become so perverted and so utterly adulterated that they now defeat and profane the noble and uplifting purpose they once were established to serve. The cynical realist can d*** well lump it if he has to get his free rubbers somewhere else.

So in conclusion, if the DHHS regulation goes into effect, regardless of which side we elect in 2012, the Catholic Church has a basic moral duty to not just stop at shutting a few clinics and schools. Any nation that feels perfectly content with a leadership that can’t tell the difference between infanticide and post-birth abortion belongs under interdict. But no, the cynical realist tells me that such radical steps can’t be seriously contemplated. After all; the world just keeps getting newer and braver each and every day.